A Stillness in Bethlehem(119)

You should what?

She loaded the rifle and wrapped it into her coat. She’d worn her long coat instead of her parka for just this purpose. She could carry it pressed to her left side without looking too strange on the street. It was very cold and people who saw her passing would think she was simply stiff with cold. Besides, nobody was really looking at anybody right now, not after what they had done to Timmy Hall. They had all gone back home to be ashamed of themselves.

She got the rifle early and went over to the park. It would have been a three-block walk if she had been in the city, maybe a third of a mile. She went into the tent they used as a dressing room and looked around, being careful not to be seen. It wasn’t hard. It was the last fifteen minutes of the play, with everybody in the cast for the night either out at the gazebo or waiting in the passage to take a bow. She thought Kelley must have gone out there, too, since Kelley was nowhere around. It was too bad. She believed in her luck—or at least, she believed in her luck with rifles—but she also knew you could push luck only so far. She’d been pushing hers straight off the cliff these last few weeks.

“Listen,” Kelley Grey had said on the telephone. “I think we have to talk.”

“Who is it?” a voice said from the other room, and she had held her breath and crossed her fingers.

“It’s for me.”

“Listen,” Kelley Grey said again. “Gemma had this manuscript. That Tisha Verek wrote, you know. And last night I read it.”

“So?”

“So there’s something in it you have to see.”

“What?”

“A picture.”

“I don’t want to see any pictures.”

“Yes, you do,” Kelley Grey insisted. “You have to see this one. You should come up to the rectory tonight after the play and let me show it to you.”

Once there had been a voice on the phone that said: I saw you walking on the stone walls Monday morning. What were you doing on the stone walls?

That voice had belonged to Gemma Bury, and the next time she had heard it Gemma had been on her way to do what she had threatened to do, on her way to talk to Peter Callisher about the story and to get it all put in the newspaper and make it… make it what?

There were people who said it was safer to kill in emptiness, but she knew it wasn’t true. She could go out to the rectory. She could shoot Kelley Grey there. She could rid herself of all the restrictions imposed by being in this tent and having so many other people to take into account. She could do all that, but if she did she would have a whole new set of problems and one she liked less. To be seen, even by one person, would be death. To make a mistake, no matter how minor, would be disaster. Besides, Kelley would be ready for her up there, waiting for her, taking precautions. She couldn’t have that.

There was a place at the end of the tent farthest from the passage to the park “stage” where the flaps came together and made a kind of curtain. She checked it out, decided it would do, and folded herself into it. Her feet were exposed, but she didn’t think anyone would notice. They would be coming back in after taking their bows and concentrating on going home. She backed up against the tent’s corner and tried to look out. She could see the flap of the two dressing rooms diagonally across from where she was. She would have to hope that Kelley came in on her own or stayed later than the others, or most of the others. If Kelley didn’t do that, she would have to go on up to the rectory after all. She got the rifle out from under her coat and felt its weight in her arms.

In the place where she had been they had long wide rooms full of tables to eat at, but if you had been good you got to sit in the smaller room where the tables were round. It was not a prize she had ever valued much—if there had been waiters and waitresses in the round-tabled room she might have felt differently—but she had always been so conscientious about working for prizes and playing to win games and being good, that she had worked at that, too. Then she would get there and it would all begin to seem so awful and terrible, so much a part of the lie that that place was, she wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore. She would stand up and start throwing things, forks and spoons, there were never any knives, furniture. She would shout and scream and tell them all to go to hell, she didn’t belong in a crazy place, and then they would sit her down in some doctor’s room and tell her: If you could behave for three months straight, we’d be more than willing to let you out of here.

But it wasn’t true.

It wasn’t true.

The whole world was a cage.

That was true.

The whole world was a cage and there was only one way to keep yourself out of it.